Oh Dani, Dani, Dani...

Admittedly, this was my first thought as the British masters of whatever-you-wish-to-call-it entered the stage. I rarely let the looks of a specific person or band influence my feeling of a show, but that new hair the energetic frontman was sporting made it quite impossible for me… Honestly, it made him look like a little kid, and his stage manners only supported this thought which I couldn’t shake for the entire concert. A kid who was desperately crying out for attention…

Something else which really helped the “daycare-centre gone wrong” feeling along was the female keyboardist/vocalist Caroline Campbell, not so much in her looks, but in her offensively annoying child-like tone of voice and her ridiculously over-dramatizing of every single line she spoke.
However, it obviously doesn’t take one or two rotten apples to ruin a whole barrel, as the rest of the musicians proved to be very focused on the job. Especially the drummer Martin 'Marthus' Škaroupka really impressed me as he was effortlessly beating the living daylights out of the poor drum-skins (apparently the guy is some kind of drum-wunderkind who has attended conservatories and played in a host of different bands), but also bassist Dave Pybus and guitarist Paul Allender did their part in enhancing the atmosphere by looking sinister as fvkk, and guitarist James McIlroy was doing windmills like he was trying to screw his own head off! I had actually seen him warming his headbanging up at the side of the stage before the show, probably to not accidentally hurt himself with the wild performance…

So, for the most part the band was actually quite impressive, and even though they had the most scraped down stage-show I’ve ever seen them perform with (except for the costumes, I believe that the only special thing was Dani Filth’s microphone stand, looking like a mesh of skeletal parts), the large audience still took the show in a good way I felt.
I’ve never been one to keep track of this band’s releases myself, but they still managed to play a good handful of songs which I recognized during their one hour on the Metalfest main stage. Many of them because they were introduced to us by the frontman. I did feel a slight touch of arrogance on Filth’s side though at one point, but I’m not sure if it was intended like this or not; anyway, the episode I’m talking about is when he was introducing the song Lilith Immaculate by saying; ”This is a song from my new album!”
I may be mistaken, but I thought the album was a team effort…

Even though I’ve never been a big C.O.F. fan, and probably never will be, I’d still say that it was nice to see the band pull of a professional and focused show, even though it didn’t appeal to my personal taste.

Setlist (incomplete):

Honey And Sulphur
Lilith Immaculate
Her Ghost In The Fog
Nymphetamine (Fix)
The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh
From The Cradle To Enslave